Real-time operator control of robots has been accomplished with electro-mechanical controls such as joysticks and multiple axis hand grips. These devices suffer from a limited range of motion due to being constrained by the geometry of the control device. In other applications, such as surgery, the operator's hand and finger motions used to operate the device do not closely approximate those motions he would use in conducting the operation by hand. This requires the surgeon to use a different repertoire of hand motions for the robot control, than he would for conducting the operation by hand. Other devices such as a glove actuator, while more closely approximating the actual motion of the hand, suffers from a lack of accuracy regarding the motion of the instrument the hand and fingers grasp, and it is the working end of the instrument which is being mimicked by the robot's tools that do the work. Other interfaces have been developed that rely on multiple cameras to record the motion of the operator's hands with or without faux instruments, but these can also suffer from a lack of accuracy.
These devices also suffer from mechanical wear and tear, which compromises accuracy and require maintenance.
These devices suffer from latency, especially when the operator is separated from the worksite by sufficient distances that there is a significant delay in transmission.
It is an object of some aspects of the invention to address one or more of the above existing concerns. Other concerns may also be addressed in those aspects, or separately in other aspects of the invention as will be evident from the remainder of this specification.
In a first aspect, the invention provides a method comprising the steps of actively generating an image pattern on a surface of a first object, detecting the image pattern on the surface of the first object, wherein either the step of actively generating or the step of detecting is performed at a second object spaced away from the first object, and determining parameters of the relative poses of the second object and the surface utilizing the detected image pattern and utilizing reference data for actively generating the image pattern.